


What We Leave Behind

by Secret Staircase (elwing_alcyone)



Category: Zero | Fatal Frame, Zero: Akai Chou | Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly
Genre: Amnesia, Gen, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-25
Updated: 2010-02-25
Packaged: 2017-10-07 13:10:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/65455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/pseuds/Secret%20Staircase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yae and Ryozo, the day after the Repentance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What We Leave Behind

Yae's world had become very small.

She knew that she had done something wrong. She knew that the gate she had never seen before was leaning in an accusation, and the empty forest and the darkness beyond were her fault, somehow. The stars were spiteful. The mountain was an angry shoulder turned against her.

But for whatever she had done, she was sorry, she was sorry.

She didn't know a single person in the world, or any other place; for all she knew the forest went on like this forever, uninhabited. Because of what she had done she was doomed to be alone. A world with no one but her was so tiny.

The sun started to rise, and the night-sounds of the forest creatures passing gave way to the singing of birds. Here in the forest, it was impossible to see far in any direction; there could be a village nearby, and she would never know, but now that she had found this gate, she didn't want to lose it again. It was the only evidence that she had not always been the only one in the world.

Its wood was smooth, softened by the elements. Sunlight struck it, and it was warm. She sat down at its foot with her back against it. A fox trotted by in the trees, briefly colouring a beam of sunlight, ignoring Yae. Perhaps she was a ghost.

There was a noise coming towards her from the forest. It wasn't a graceful animal noise, but a loud, clumsy something crashing through undergrowth and stumbling on roots, disturbing the birds. She waited, very still, very quiet, and a patch of green suddenly broke out of the green background and came towards the gate. It was a person.

At first he didn't see Yae; his eyes were on the broken gate, and he ran to it.

'No,' he muttered, 'no, it can't be! Where's the path? Where's the village?'

He was so distracted that when he came round to Yae he nearly tripped over her. He dropped to his knees as if he had, and put a hand on her shoulder.

'Yae,' he whispered, his face white under a thin layer of travel dirt. 'Where... where's...?'

He looked around the quiet forest. Yae watched him. His hair was tousled and his kimono looked as if he'd been wearing it for days. She wasn't alone – she knew she should be relieved, overjoyed, but she was dismayed. He spoke to her by name, as if he knew her, but his face to her was as strange as the shape of the mountain. Something was terribly wrong.

He looked at her again with earnest eyes that she had never seen before. 'Nobody else?' he said.

'I haven't seen anybody.'

His hand was still on her shoulder. It squeezed now, gently. She could feel each of his fingers pressing down. 'I'm so sorry. I tried to get up here as fast as I could, but... I was too late, wasn't I?'

She said, 'Who are you?'

His face was now a mirror of what she felt. His hand dropped to his side. He said, in a lost voice,

'My name is Ryozo. Don't you remember?'

She didn't. She stared at his face, trying to arrange his features into a familiar pattern, but she couldn't.

Ryozo took a handful of leaves from the ground and crushed them, letting the pieces fall one by one. 'Never mind,' he said. 'I'm a friend – do you believe me?'

She might not remember, but she could recognise that he meant no harm to her; it was in all his movements, all his looks.

'And you haven't seen anyone else?' It seemed an urgent question from the way he kept asking it. 'No one, maybe, who looks like you?'

Someone who looked like her? She found the idea oddly frightening.

'No,' she said. 'Nobody but you.'

'You really don't remember anything?'

She wished she did, if only so he wouldn't have that hurt expression any more. 'I was in the forest,' she offered. 'I found this gate. I think I did something wrong.'

'No,' he said at once, 'you didn't. You did exactly what you were supposed to. I'm the one who – I was meant to be here before, but I – ' He crushed another handful of leaves. 'I'll explain,' he said, 'but later. Just... would you... stay here for a minute, will you? I'm just going to...' He gestured, wordless, and then hurried away into the forest on the other side of the broken gate. The wilderness green absorbed him, and Yae was alone again.

Just when she was beginning to wonder if she had imagined him, he reappeared, walking more slowly now. He looked even paler than before, and when he reached the gate, he put out a hand and leaned against it, closing his eyes.

'What did you find?' she asked.

He shook his head. 'Nothing. There's nothing there.' He straightened, wiping his hands on his sleeves in a nervous way. 'We have to go now,' he said. 'Can you walk? You're not hurt?'

She wasn't. They started walking the way he had come. She looked back once, to see the black, leaning gate on its own between the trees. She didn't know why, but the sight of it made her want to weep. She looked down at the path as it wobbled and blurred and came back together again.

They passed a small dosojin statue at the foot of a tree. Ryozo didn't want to stop, but Yae looked at it as they went by. It looked like a carving of two people, and one of them had no head. She kept that image in her mind, turning it over.

'Can you tell me what I've forgotten?' she asked. 'It seems important. I'd like to know.'

He glanced at her doubtfully. 'I will,' he said, 'right now if you like, but would you mind if we waited? I'd rather do it somewhere private.'

She looked around at the deserted forest. 'There's nobody here,' she pointed out. He didn't deny it, but looked a little sheepish.

'I don't know,' he said, 'somewhere with walls and food and clean clothes. Somewhere civilised.'

She nodded, absorbing the information. So this wasn't civilised, to him. She thought of the old gate, and that odd deities statue. The sense of enormous wrongdoing was fading, and it was strange to think about now, like a feeling in a dream that she couldn't recapture upon waking. She was beginning to feel better, more like herself, though she couldn't have said how she knew this was herself and the other mood wasn't.

The forest was warm and sunny, and the path grew broader and more even as they walked; it was all downhill, easy going. She was tired, but felt strong, as if she could walk all day, and she was with Ryozo, who had come all this way to find her. Perhaps she had reason to be upset, but it was difficult to get too worked up about things she couldn't remember.

There was one thing that kept marring her optimism, and that was a sense that something was missing. Sometimes it came over her very strongly, and at those moments it was all she could do to keep from turning and running back up the path to the Torii gate, to find the thing that she had left behind. She was sure there was something; the feeling wouldn't go away no matter how she tried to ignore it, and she couldn't think what it was about.

They walked nearly all day. By then, Yae's legs were tingling up and down their length, her feet were aching, and she was very hungry. Ryozo had had a little food in his bag, which they'd shared in the afternoon, but it was a very long day, and Yae, of course, could not remember when she had last eaten.

Ryozo kept saying they were almost there, but he started saying it about two hours before they actually reached the village. Perhaps because she was now too tired to pay attention to anything but walking, Yae did not notice any sign of nearby habitation until they rounded an outcropping of worn rock and saw the village below. There were thirty or so houses and fields all around.

As they came through the fields on the uneven track, all the men bent there harvesting rice straightened up stiffly and looked at them. Women drawing rice stems between sticks to loosen the grain stopped their work and turned to look. There were children running about, some in sandals and some barefooted, and one of them must have spread the word that there were strangers coming, because before very long, a group of men came out of the main village and gathered on the path, waiting there.

Ryozo turned to Yae. 'Stay here,' he said, 'I'd better talk to them.'

Yae nodded. She was so tired, she would have sat down in the dirt of the path if she could have, but there were still people watching her from the fields. She stayed standing.

Ryozo was talking to one of the men in particular; the others just stood there. Yae, looking at them, thought they looked like a human barrier, preventing anyone from entering the village. The man Ryozo was talking to had an odd mixture of deference and authority: he kept bowing respectfully, but then shaking his head in what appeared to be flat denial of whatever Ryozo was saying. Their voices were loud enough to carry, though not loud enough for her to make out the words.

As she watched, Yae began to grow convinced that all this was about her. It was the way the man kept looking at her, and some of the gestures that Ryozo made which seemed to aim back down the path where Yae was standing. The proof came when Ryozo reached into the breast of his kimono and drew out a pouch, holding it out to the man. The man backed away as if afraid to touch it, pointed a thin finger straight at Yae, made a sweeping gesture with his flattened hands, shook his head and bowed again.

Yae looked down at herself. She hadn't really thought about what she was wearing, because Ryozo hadn't seemed to think it was strange. It was a plain white kimono with a red rope tied around the waist, hanging to her ankle. She looked around at all the women in the fields. Nobody else was wearing anything like that.

Ryozo was coming back now. 'Come on,' he said, sounding disgusted. 'They're not going to let us stay. He says they can't even let us in the village. We'll have to go around.'

'Why won't they let me in?' she asked as they started walking.

'I said us, not you,' said Ryozo.

'I saw that man when he was talking to you,' said Yae. 'I saw the way everyone looked at me. I'm the one they don't want.'

He looked away. 'It's just superstition, that's all. Come on, I think there's a shrine a little way on. It doesn't have a dedicated priest, so we ought to be able to stay there.'

He was right about the shrine. It was very small, very old and rather creaky, and in winter it would have been cold and damp, but in summer it was warm enough. There were old offerings on the altar, so dried out that Yae couldn't tell what they had been, and light slanted in from a high lattice window.

'You get some rest,' Ryozo said, shouldering his bag again.

'Where are you going?'

'The next village along. I'll see if I can get some food, and something for you to wear. I won't be more than an hour.

He looked at her anxiously, as if she might beg him not to leave. Perhaps some people were afraid of spending time alone in an old shrine, but Yae wasn't. She was tired, anyway, much too tired to argue.

After Ryozo was gone, Yae didn't go to sleep at once. She looked at herself more carefully, thoughtfully. The kimono she wore was thick – she'd been hot in it, coming down the mountain – and good quality, padded silk. It was just the whiteness of it that was strange. She touched her hair. All the women in the fields had had long hair, worn scraped away from their faces and pinned up at the back, but Yae's was loose, not all that much longer than Ryozo's, and it scarcely touched her shoulders.

Her hands, too, did not feel like hands that worked in the fields for hours a day. Her fingertips were soft, uncallused.

But it was the rope that really made her stand out. She sensed that. It was such a vivid red, even in the dim light that came into the shrine. The colour seemed to leave stains on her eyes, almost to glow in the dark.

The trailing end was frayed, all the woven cords starting to come apart. She picked at the knot at her waist until she found the other end: it was still whole, dipped in red wax to keep the strands together. So one end had been cut.

She was nodding now, sleep drifting down on her in warm waves. Yae put her head down on her knees and closed her eyes. The rope was a mystery she couldn't solve just now.

I suppose, she thought, just at the moment her thoughts dissolved, I must have been tied to something...

***

Ryozo slid the shrine door shut behind him; it caught on something and made a much louder noise than he'd intended.

'Yae,' he called in a low voice. He knew she was still there – he could see her white kimono in the gloom – but he wanted to hear her speak, to know for sure that she was all right.

'I'm here,' she answered, her voice soft-edged with sleep. Good: if she'd been asleep, she wouldn't have missed him or noticed that he'd been gone so long. Makabe had been teaching Ryozo to judge distance accurately, but so far, Ryozo wasn't much good at it.

'I got everything,' he said, sitting beside her. At first he sat too close, and their arms were pressed together. He shifted away with a mumbled apology, and dug out the food: eggs still in their shells, cooked to make them hard, and rice balls, and a little pot of steamed vegetables, cold and soggy by now. They couldn't see to use chopsticks, so they ate with their fingers, both almost falling asleep more than a few times.

'It's dark,' Yae observed at one point.

'It took longer than I thought,' said Ryozo. 'Sorry. It'll be better tomorrow night. There's an inn where we can stay while I decide what to do.'

'About me?'

'About everything.' He sighed, rubbing his eyes. 'I was an apprentice to a folklorist, you know, but my teacher's dead.'

She started. 'Dead?'

'Well, I... I don't really know. He was in the village where you... it's hard to explain, but I think he must be dead.'

They ate for a while in silence.

'Why,' she said, 'did you ask if I'd seen somebody who looked like me?'

'Did I?' He tried to recall. He supposed he must have, and he knew exactly why, but he avoided answering for now.

'It frightened me when you said that.'

'It's all right,' he said at once. 'I was confused. There's nobody like that.'

She nodded, satisfied. He put the pot to one side to wash out in the morning; he'd promised to bring it back to the woman who'd lent it.

'You were upset when I didn't remember you,' Yae said when he settled back down beside her.

He looked away. He had been, a little, but it was stupid. She'd forgotten everything: her family, her friends, even Sae, the person she'd loved most in the world. There was no particular reason she'd remember him over everyone else. Even so, he had been disappointed.

'I'm sorry,' she said, correctly interpreting his failure to answer. 'But I can tell that you're my friend. I knew that almost immediately. I don't know if that helps.'

It did help. 'I'm glad.'

She edged towards him, and rested her head on his shoulder. 'Is this all right?'

'It's fine,' he said. His eyes wouldn't stay open any longer. Still sitting upright on the hard wooden floor of the shrine, with Yae leaning against him, he went to sleep.

***

In the morning, Yae started trying to pick apart the knot in the red cord. It was tied so tightly that eventually she had to ask Ryozo for a knife to cut it. He watched as she did, thinking of what that cord had meant in the village. If she knew, would she have cut it off so casually?

He still hadn't decided how much to tell her. She seemed happy enough now. Was there really any good reason to upset her by telling her everything? She'd had a twin sister, who was dead. She'd had a father, who'd tried to make her kill that sister. She'd had Itsuki, someone she and Ryozo had both considered a friend, and he had helped her to escape, and now was dead. She' had a home, which was gone forever, wiped from the map. Why tell her about everything she'd lost when she'd probably be much happier not knowing?

He sat on the steps of the shrine, his rigid back guarding the doors behind which Yae was changing into the kimono he'd brought. It was blue and very old, plain and shabby, and the obi was brown and even older, but it had been the best he could do. The woman he'd spoken to had been reluctant even to part with that.

When she came out, though, he didn't much regret it: she looked reassuringly normal. Although he would never have feared her the way the villagers had, in his heart of hearts, he had been a bit unsettled by her morbid white kimono, and that severed red cord like a stream of blood. Those clothes had made her look like the bad omen people here believed she was.

She had the white kimono bundled up in her arms, and Ryozo put it in his bag. As he was doing it, she said in a rather small voice, 'I'd rather not know.'

He looked up. 'What?'

'I've been thinking. I don't know what happened to me before, but what I can make out... what I keep coming back to... that is, I think it must have been horrible. So I think I don't really want to know.'

Ryozo was surprised by the force of his own relief. 'Are you sure?'

She nodded. 'I might change my mind one day,' she said, as if warning him.

'Of course. I'll tell you whatever you want to know.'

'Thank you.'

He was washing out the pot that the village woman had lent him when Yae came to kneel beside him.

'You said you'd tell me anything,' she said.

'I will.' He tried not to sound unwilling, but he hoped she hadn't changed her mind already.

'I'd like to know about you,' she said, studying his face and smiling, the same slightly playful smile he saw in his mind whenever he thought of her, the smile that had kept pushing itself forward and distracting him in the village, when he was trying to concentrate on research for Mr. Makabe. Yae and that smile were all that remained of Minakami, and because he still had them, he didn't feel quite as bereft as he ought to have done.

'I'm not very interesting,' he said, pulling his gaze away from her smiling mouth and turning his blush towards the ground.

'I don't mind,' she said. 'Tell me everything about your life, so I can pretend I was there too. It'll be as if we grew up together.'

The idea pleased him. He agreed.

Yae stood a little stiffly – she was still sore from walking so far the day before – and waited for him on the road. It was a long way home, but she was ready.

Checking inside the shrine one last time to make sure they hadn't left anything, he saw the cord in a little heap of scarlet before the dusty altar. He let it stay there.


End file.
